


Unintended

by Derkish (orphan_account)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25100269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Derkish
Summary: The worst part of the fight—even as Toph struggled for breath, her heart pumping doubletime and her head dizzy—was the resignation in Sokka's voice when he said, "We're not gonna make it.""You're right," she said. "Neither of us will get away if we both try to run. I'll hold them off as long as I can."—Toph and Sokka are ambushed while delivering an intelligence report, and Toph convinces Sokka to flee. He wakes up several days later, injured and frantic, to learn that no one has seen her since. He spends most of his time reflecting on his choices in their last moments. When she's eventually rescued, they work together to heal and confront the things they left unsaid.
Relationships: Toph Beifong/Sokka
Comments: 9
Kudos: 102





	Unintended

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic in 2012, but since the ATLA Renaissance is apparently happening right now, I decided to migrate it over from FFnet to this account. I posted a few links to some of the other fics in the endnotes, in case you're still thirsty after reading this one.
> 
> This was originally 8 chapters, but I collapsed them into one long chapter here, leaving the quotes that started each original chapter. I swear it was really trendy to do that at the time.
> 
> Content warnings include: some mild violence, physical injuries, descriptions of physical abuse.
> 
> And finally, a word of gratitude to Snowy (formerly Snows-of-Yester-Year), who did the original beta work on this eight years ago. Wherever you are, I hope you are living it up.

_"The true genius shudders at incompleteness—and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."_ \- Edgar Allan Poe

* * *

The worst part of the fight was not that they had all but lost. It was not that they had been caught upon stumbling into the central hub of the loyalist rebellion, or that both of them earned devastating wounds within the first minute. It was not even that this rebellion meant the potential collapse of the harmony restoration movement's final stage.

No, Toph could handle all of these things. The movement had been challenged before, she'd battled broken limbs before (though never something so debilitating as a leg), and frankly, rebellions stopped surprising her years ago. The worst part of the fight—even as she struggled for breath, her heart pumping doubletime and her head dizzy—was the resignation in Sokka's voice when he said, "We're not gonna make it."

She couldn't handle his verbal defeat. With an effortful grunt, Toph pulled a wall up from the ground and engulfed the entire rebel force within it. She turned her back on the rock partition and slid down on her good leg, fingers gripping the dirt to hold the walls in place.

"You're right," she said. "Neither of us will get away if we both try to run. I'll hold them off as long as I can."

Sokka, who had been using this moment to tie his belt around the gash in his head, started as if she had shocked him. "What? No! I'm not leaving without you."

"If you've got a better idea, now would be a great time to—"

Toph gasped as the earth wall shuddered against her back. She dug her heels deeper, widened her stance. Kneeling across from her, Sokka faltered but did not budge. He had one arm tight across his shoulder bag, protecting the invaluable intelligence report that they had traveled across the Earth Kingdom to secure. Somehow this makeshift band of rebels had not made it into the document.

"I can't," he said, after a pause filled only by the sound of flame and fists on rock. "You go. I can't leave you. I would rather—"

"No offense, but this isn't sparring practice. Your sword isn't going to take down a whole army."

"It doesn't have to. I just need to last long enough for you to get away. You're the greatest earthbender in the world! You could make it."

"Yeah," Toph sighed. "I could. But _you're_ the brains behind every move we make. Without you, everything falls apart—the whole restoration movement. Everything."

Toph heard the panic as it broke inside of him. It swelled in his chest and shattered into a tearless sob, a sound of hysteria but also of hate.

She had him.

Sokka might never forgive himself, but he would live and let the burn ebb into recovery. His limbs were shaking just like hers, a sick concoction of adrenaline and despair, shivering up from the ground and over every inch of her body. Heaving for breath, Toph shifted the weight of the wall to one arm. It trembled but held fast. Reaching across the gap, Toph grabbed on to whatever bit of Sokka's tunic she reached first, and pulled him in so fast that the kiss caught him mid-gasp. There was no time to linger but she lingered anyway, fixed in one last moment with the weight of both their lives held in one hand.

The kiss didn't register with Sokka until it was almost too late. He had barely begun to lean in before she pulled away, pressed her palm against his chest, and shoved him backward across the clearing.

"Run!"

Toph waited to attack until Sokka's scampering footfalls died. This did little use. Sokka did not see the battle that unfurled, but in the long seconds before the woods swallowed him up, he heard it.

* * *

_"At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections."_ – William O. Douglas

* * *

Sokka awoke to darkness.

The pull of medication kept him under for three days after he came-to in a foreign hospital bed during the middle of the night. His frantic plea, repeated countless times over— _where is she? where is she?_ — had drawn half a dozen baffled medics into the room. It was the thrashing that finally brought out the sedative.

By the time Aang and Katara finally arrived on Appa, Sokka was silent, his voice gone and throat raw. Katara flung her arms around him, peppered his face with tearful kisses, and demanded to know what had happened.

It had been a week. One week and already Sokka could not remember—in sprinting through the woods faster than he had ever moved in his life, his brain must have substituted thought for speed. He learned that a couple found him unconscious in the woods while hunting and carried him to the nearest medical station. His bad leg was swollen, both his wrists strained, his head bleeding freely and three of his ribs fractured—it was a miracle that adrenaline had carried him as far as it did.

At some point while the medics in the small-town infirmary tried to put him back together, Sokka regained consciousness long enough to tell them that the rebels were on their way, then promptly passed out and did not wake. He was thereafter transported here, to a larger hospital close to the southern Earth Kingdom stronghold, where the facility had the resources needed to treat him.

The head doctor in charge, a middle-aged woman with a touch gentler than her line-tight smile, told the story as Katara rearranged his sheets and Aang discreetly pried the intelligence report from the remnants of Sokka's charred bag.

"The rebel group had scattered by the time the military got there. I've been told that they left behind most of their wounded—and there was a good number of them.” Then the doctor turned to Sokka. "You stopped the rebels from destroying the movement. You're a hero."

Sokka did not remember any of this alleged hero work. What he did see, played painstakingly slow before his eyes, was the moment Toph talked him into leaving her behind. It was the taste of shared sweat and dirt and chapped lips, a breath cut short.

The weight of his betrayal was settling in his veins like a poison, growing deathly stronger with every new cycle, overrunning whatever logic may have justified. He never should have left her. He should have died rather than leave her.

Aang glanced up from the intelligence report to exchange a dark look with Sokka—or rather, to look concernedly at Sokka's listless expression before turning back to the doctor. "We're missing a member of our group. Toph Beifong—she’s eighteen, an earthbender about Katara's height. She and Sokka were traveling together…"

The doctor shook her head. "I'm sorry, we have nobody by that description. You'll have to check with General Wei; he led the offense against the rebels. Maybe she’s with them."

Aang took off on his glider at once and returned some time later with the news that General Wei hadn’t seen her, either. Sokka knew this should have ignited a spark of hope; no body at the battleground almost certainly meant that Toph was alive, for now. Instead he only felt a plummeting in his gut. There were few ways that any group of people could keep Toph Beifong contained this long, and each method was progressively worse than the previous. And unfortunately, Sokka's imagination was sharper than most.

He was able to contain the bubble in his chest for several more days. The trick to it was keeping his mouth shut, swallowing it back down whenever it tried to claw up his throat. Eventually he had to speak when the medics began to wonder aloud if he had sustained brain damage from the blow to his skull, but even then he refrained from anything longer than a few words. Thankfully, with their initial concerns resolved, the medical staff instead attributed his silence to pain and let him be.

The formal search party yielded no result. Aang and Katara appeared in his room with their heads bowed, sopping wet and shivering from the winter's first snow. Sokka said nothing. He showed no reaction at all, in fact, until a pair of unexpected visitors arrived without warning.

Lao Beifong had never looked so unraveled, not even after Toph turned up for the first time a year after the war, covered in dirt and dressed triumphantly in peasant's rags. Though her relationship to Lao and Poppy had never been spectacular, years of sitting on mutual resentment had led to an almost civil rapport. Whatever leftover bitterness the Beifongs harbored was long gone now.

As if his gaunt face and trembling hands did not give him away, Lao's voice carried with it all the weight of his daughter's love. "Please," he stammered at Sokka. The rest of the world had disappeared—the staff, even Aang and Katara, were hardly blurs in Sokka's periphery. "If you know anything—anything at all, please help us bring her home… this was all they found for us."

Lao reached into his bag and withdrew from it a tarnished green headband. Poppy detached herself from her husband and took a few timid steps forward. The sight of Sokka must have startled her as much as she astounded him. The gash on his face was stitched and cleaned, and Katara's healing would reduce the scarring to a notch in his left brow. Compared to his other wounds, his head was fit for fighting. His left leg was bandaged from the mid-thigh to his ankle, his bare torso wrapped and his arms burned. By the time she set her hands on his shoulders, Sokka had already begun to tremble.

"I understand now that was her decision to leave home, and that she loves you more than she ever loved us," she said. "And I know it is selfish of me to say, but… I wish she had never met you."

Sokka crumbled. Tears spilled over, hot with shame and grief and backed by the sob he'd been holding since the beginning. Ignorant to the stabbing in his ribs, Poppy pulled Sokka close and hugged him tight. They cried until they could not breathe.

* * *

_"Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, makes the night morning, and the noontide night."_ – William Shakespeare

* * *

On his fifth day of consciousness, Sokka decided that he could not sit uselessly on the sidelines of the investigation any longer. The visit from Toph's parents had shaken him in a way nothing else had—perhaps it was the outpouring of his grief that had ruined the necessity for silence, but he ceased his quiet streak at once and became a model patient. He reiterated to Aang and Katara everything that had happened that day. The path they had taken from the southernmost tip of Earth Kingdom mainland, where they had stayed when they collected the classified intelligence report. Their exact location when they tromped into the middle of a massive group mid-preparation for an attack on the southern stronghold. How long it took them to fight and how far they traveled in the process. And finally, how Toph had convinced him to run.

The more intimate details of the engagement Sokka kept to himself, furled and stuffed into a secret corner of his mind like a love note in the depth of his pocket.

It was this memory that kept him talking when talking was the only way of playing a role in finding her. He otherwise sat and let the medics prod him and change his wound dressings without complaint, rising only to hobble to the toilet or to test out his newly re-mangled leg (the latter ending in dismay).

In the meantime, Aang was tripling his search efforts while simultaneously following up on what had turned out to be the most critical intelligence report yet (at least this travesty of a mission had yielded something worthwhile). Katara was running between the hospital and the nearest base like a madwoman, growing more exhausted by the minute. Sokka sat and yawned and itched at the inside of his leg bandage with a chopstick.

When he awoke on the fifth night from a nightmare, he decided that it was time to get moving. If he could only get to the spot he last remembered, maybe he would notice something the others had missed. Nobody, except perhaps Aang, knew Toph's fighting style better than Sokka. She was the sparring partner who kept him guessing, the steadfast warrior at his shoulder, the first one to return the favor if someone knocked him off his feet. She had left him signs before, when the fight managed to cleave them apart. In the event of a hostage situation such as this, Sokka and Toph both knew that leaving a trail was priority.

All he had to do was get to Appa, who Sokka assumed was staying wherever Aang and Katara slept at night… a location he hadn't quite figured out yet, but it had to be close. So he climbed out of bed, pulled his burned parka on over his naked upper half, traded his baggy hospital scrub bottoms for Aang's spare windpants (which Katara had forgotten to take with her in her rush), shouldered his bag, and shuffled out the door.

Katara found him two hours later about a hundred meters from the hospital, face-down in the snow. His crutch had caught a root, sending him into a stomach dive that his sprained wrists were not strong enough to break. His first response was to crawl on his elbows, but the ensuing spark of pain that flared in his ribs and lungs was enough to sever his efforts altogether.

Oddly enough, and despite his constant drive to find his friend, his two-hour rendezvous with the ground had helped to calm him. He didn't realize how anxious the bustle of the hospital made him until he had escaped from it. Out here in the woods, the only sound was the quiet banter of nature, the occasional winter songbird and the _plunk_ of snow falling from tree branches.

Sokka had pulled his hood up to keep his ears safe from frostbite, but did not grant himself the privilege of flipping over to his back. Again he had failed. His body had been strong for so many useless years, through so many escapades, until the moment he needed it most. It baffled him that in abandoning Toph he had managed to run for three miles before breaking down. Now he was all but paralyzed (the logical side of his brain, which he ignored, suggested a causal relationship between his past exertion and his current condition). If he was too helpless to aid his best friend, then he could lay here in the snow and bear the punishment of sharp air in his lungs and the slow creep of snow through his parka.

His foray into the woods had also let his mind wander out of its fixed point (panic, mostly) into something much more complicated. In the very last moments, Toph left him with one gesture for Sokka to contemplate in the aftermath—a kiss, not stolen but given, and _accepted_ in return.

Sokka returned to this puzzling twist as he lay on the ground, his limbs numbing over with cold. He and Toph had established long ago that their dynamic worked better than either of them predicted during her first few weeks as the Avatar's teacher. They had an easy banter and complementary temperaments that meant they almost never fought. Viewing their friendship through the cloud of recent troubles, Sokka could picture the lazy summers of their teenage years, spent in hours of aimless conversation while his machete dangled at ease around his shins.

Sokka could admit that, yes, he enjoyed spending time with Toph, perhaps more than with anybody else. They never grew tired of one another, always stumbling upon something new to discuss even when he fell short with others (including Suki before their mutual breakup, though he would never let the admission creep out from behind his teeth). It was the reason that, while visiting his sister in Republic City, Sokka jumped aboard when Toph mentioned her looming trip to the southern stronghold. The way down had been an adventure rather than a chore; with no need for catching up, they spent otherwise wasted time on exploring the towns in their path. The previous years had presented him with several predicaments (namely an irritating but persistent attraction) all of which he swept off of his shoulders in the name of friendship.

But that kiss. Now, after years of reassuring himself that his intentions were only ever platonic, Sokka was having trouble differentiating the general sting of loss with something else altogether. Would this hollow ache in his head and heart be any different if it were someone else—Aang, or his sister? It was a theory he hoped to never test, but imagined that it must feel the same. If this particular array of circumstances had sparked in him an epiphany or change, Sokka pointedly ignored it. This was the time to defer, not linger.

Sokka heard Katara's gasp off to the far side, the sound of her boots cutting through the snow as her pace quickened. A moment later she appeared, pale and aghast, on the fringe of his vision.

"Sokka, what happened? What're you doing out here?"

He sighed, his breath momentarily fogging his vision in the cold. "Oh, you know, just reconnecting with my native element."

Together they managed to sit him upright, and Sokka let Katara check him over without argument. A rush of warmth ran through him as Katara pressed her palms over his ears.

"You're freezing," she said, audibly burying her relief in a tone of annoyance. "At least you had the sense to wear your coat—you could have frozen to death!"

"It's practically summer compared to home," said Sokka. He waved away her concern and winced when his wrist twinged. "How'd you know I was missing, anyway? Before I, uh, decided to sit down for a bit, I was looking for wherever you're staying."

Katara frowned, withdrawing her gaze. "I've been sleeping in the lobby," she said.

"Oh."

"Well, I suppose if you're all right…"

Katara's sentence drifted. Sokka noted with a pang that his master plan had only done more hurt to his family. Newly ashamed by his impulsive decision-making, Sokka tugged her into the tightest hug that he could manage. As Katara reciprocated, she added, "But you should know that there's a room of angry hospital workers who aren't as forgiving as me."

"That's okay, I probably deserve it."

When they parted a few moments later, she helped him to his feet. He dusted away as much snow as he could without bending, took his crutch from her, and started the long trudge back to the hospital. The quiet followed them until the building appeared over the hill, where smoke rose demurely from the tall chimney and the bustling noise began to drift across the clearing. Sokka eyed the snow-frosted building warily. Once inside, he would consent to stay until otherwise released—as he had just demonstrated with his latest escape attempt, he was not fit to search for angry rebels (much less single-handedly fight and complete a rescue mission if he found them). Katara seemed to be thinking along his train of thought.

"You can't possibly have thought you could go find her on your own," she said, adjusting his arm around her shoulder as they began the descent downhill.

A jolt ran up his side, which he plowed through with a grimace. Leaning heavily on his sister, Sokka used his crutch to take every other step forward, his doubly-bad leg bent at the knee.

What Toph had fed him was a numbers game, in so many words. Toph had a better chance than he of holding the rebels off and escaping afterward; why waste her talent on a getaway if she could save them both? Toph had willingly offered her life in exchange for his—an act, Sokka was coming to realize, that had not been purely logical. And in return for her sacrifice, he was out looking for a fight he could never win.

"You're right. By endangering myself, I put everything at risk again. Toph… well." Sokka shook his head. "She'd leave a bruise if she knew, anyway."

"I'm sure she will."

* * *

_"I could feel myself begin to recede, to tip and lose balance, slide toward the deeper darkness that had crept in from outside. It happened so quickly and took me by surprise; sometimes I just turned around and found it there—ah, camarade—unaware it had been waiting for me for days."_ \- Bryan Mealer

* * *

The second week was upon him before he'd had a chance to grasp the first. After a final assessment, the doctor declared that Sokka's brain, at least, was intact enough to resume some level of responsibility. He was never happier to see a job than when Aang appeared in the doorway an hour after the checkup, his arms laden in paperwork and a resigned grin on his face.

"Take it slow, will you?" Aang said, gingerly setting an overflowing box at the foot of the bed. "After you told us what happened, we did some investigating and found that there are a few more cells like the one you ran into. Most of them just want me dead, but…"

He shrugged at the death threat as if it were a mildly troublesome weather report. Then he placed a hand on Sokka's shoulder and added in a low voice, "We really have been lost without you, you know. I doubt even know where to _start_ with all of this."

Sokka arched a brow. "You'd think that after mastering the elements, mastering map-reading would be a cinch."

"Not everyone has the gift, Sokka."

The box of miscellaneous reports and intercepted letters gave Sokka a much-needed outlet for his frenzied energy. He poured over the paperwork from the moment he awoke in the morning until lunch, at which point he allowed himself one hour to unwind before jumping back in again. The pieces did not fall together in a neat line, but rather in a tangle of interconnected plots and political chatter. Nighttime could not stifle his drive. He nearly got into a fistfight with an attendant when the latter caught him up after midnight, using a caliper to measure distances by candlelight.

During his scarcely-allotted free time, Sokka hobbled into the lobby on one crutch in search of Katara, who had set up her own personal workspace in a cramped coatroom. He made a point of visiting her often after learning that she was sacrificing a cozy bed with Aang just to be within a moment's reach of her brother. They played cards and tried to make sense of the pieces he had deciphered thus far—a worthy task, but still nowhere as fruitful as he had hoped.

Discussing these matters with Katara also reminded Sokka that it had been weeks since he picked up his sword. Though he had yet to begin working with the physical therapist, getting basic strength in his limbs did not sound remotely as satisfying as sparring for a bit. When he tried to get Katara's consent for this idea (on the grounds of being prepared for an attack), she reminded him that he still couldn’t bear weight on his leg, and could hold nothing heavier than a scroll before his wrists ached with such severity that he dropped whatever was in his grip. Then she sent him to his room.

Early one morning, Sokka awoke to find Aang standing by the windowsill, studying the map that Sokka had pinned to the wall. Overriding his instinct to announce himself, he settled back against the pillows and watched instead. Aang stood there for no less than ten minutes, wordlessly tracing lines with one finger, checking the Sokka's meticulous markings against a scrap of paper.

Sokka pretended to be asleep when Aang left, and rose to follow him as soon as he heard the click of the closing door. The sun had yet to rise, and almost all of the patients down the long hallway were peaceably asleep. He greeted the aid behind the desk with a distracted wave.

"Everything all right?" said the aid, cheerful but suspicious.

Nodding, Sokka progressed forward, well aware that the aid would run off to fetch her supervisor as soon as he rounded the corner.

The pain didn't register until Sokka had passed through the lobby doors, and only then did he realize that he had left his medication on the bedside table in his room. He paused, squinting in the dim lamplight, leaning against the wall. His chest felt tight with the combination of cracked ribs and renewed anxiety. As he had expected, Aang was long gone. And as he had expected, Katara was awake, standing at the window with her eyes on the sky. He suspected that if he were to stick his head out through the front door, he might catch a glimpse of Appa's tail disappearing over the woods.

Katara was thrown into shadow by the beginnings of the sunrise outside, traced in an outline of glowing light. She turned upon hearing a weak cough to find Sokka slumped by the door, rubbing a hand over his chest bandage.

"What's going on?" he demanded.

He didn't realize that she was crying until she answered (a bit too quickly), "Nothing!"

"What’s going on here?"

In an effort to cross the room, Sokka tripped and would have fallen over had he not caught himself on a chair. Holding the pained cry in his throat, Sokka waved Katara away when she darted forward to help. "I'm fine, just— _agh_ —where's Aang? I saw him in my room just now."

Katara wavered mid-step, suddenly round-shouldered with palpable guilt. "He's… not here."

"So where did he go?"

"Um, he's—" she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and took a breath. "He just had to follow up on something."

"Something having to do with my map of rebellion cells?"

"No, nothing like that. Why don't you go back to bed, Sokka? I'm sure he'll be back before lunch, and then we can talk about it."

They blinked at one another in the semi-darkness, Sokka overwrought and Katara on the defensive. Light was brimming through the window now, reflecting as a pinkish burn in the snow.

"So you're crying over a harmless follow-up that has nothing to do with Aang going after a potentially deadly band of rebels that would like to mount his head on their wall like a stuffed turkey-hawk?" Sokka took her hurt expression and horrified silence as confirmation. He threw his hands in the air. "Those markings were only speculation—he could be walking right into a trap! Why didn't you tell me first?"

"I'm sorry, but we couldn't—Sokka, what is it?"

His breath hitched in his throat as the room began to spin.

Sokka fell backward onto the chair he had been using as a second crutch and clamped a hand to his chest. He couldn't lose someone else to his foolishness. He couldn't—he couldn't _breathe_. A sweat had broken across his skin without warning, creeping along his sternum and snaking up to his fingers. Katara's gasp sounded distant in his ears.

It was as if the ceiling had cracked and debris was falling crumbling over his head. A sudden and inexplicable need to run came over him, but Sokka was paralyzed with fear. His lungs begged for air but were empty and heavy and heaving. He hardly knew where he was.

If Katara responded to his strange behavior, Sokka did not notice. His mind had latched on to a frantic realization: he had somehow managed to lose another member of their family. Sokka had been the one to send him off. Aang couldn't fight them, he had no _idea_ what incredible battle lay in store, he was—he—

Aang was dead already. And Sokka, struggling to breathe against his tightening chest, was dead already, or dying, or tipped so far into the dark that it didn't matter either way.

Sokka didn't know if he was sitting or standing by the time the doctor appeared with the aid at her heels. Katara's panicked voice may have been in his head, too—a look into the future, perhaps.

There were hands on his shoulders and chest, pushing and tugging while voices tried to bring him down. But Sokka was untouchable, thrashing, clawing toward the door, so that if he had one last breath he could use it to keep Aang safe. Finally a sturdy force pinned him to the ground. A pinch in his arm, and then—finally—blissful nothing.

* * *

_"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."_ \- Virginia Woolf

* * *

When Sokka came-to in his bed, Aang was sitting atop a chest of drawers with his hands folded in his lap. Sokka was unsure how to respond—a small portion of his brain thought that he must be hallucinating, and another was wondering how long he had been asleep this time.

"I owe you an apology," Aang said, the sound of his voice breaking through the film over Sokka's consciousness. "Katara told me you had a panic attack and tried fighting off ten people."

Sokka shuddered as the memory flooded back into his head. Pressing it gently from the forefront, he asked instead, "How long was I out?"

"Just a few hours. Listen, Sokka," Aang said heavily, "I thought that if you knew what was happening, you would freak out—but I was wrong. Or at least I was wrong in thinking that I could help by not telling you. So I'm going to explain what happened this morning."

It was then that Sokka noticed a small bit of bandage peeking out through the sleeve of Aang's shirt, indicating a much larger wrap over the entirety of his shoulder. An injury. Sokka sat up so fast that he almost fell out of bed.

"How could you just assume that my map was accurate? I had no idea what sort of forces were building in that camp," he cried. "You could have been killed!"

Aang shook his head. He reached into his tunic and withdrew a scrap of parchment, which he unfurled and held up for Sokka to squint at from across the room. "I knew what we were up against because I had _this_. It was intercepted late last night, and when I read it…" he cleared his throat, turned the paper in his hands, and read, "' _The extra cargo is faulty. I extracted no new information since acquisition, and specimen is becoming a burden. How should I dispose of it?'_ "

"Toph," Sokka murmured. Less than two minutes awake and he was already on the brink of fainting again.

"Exactly. This letter told me three things. One—" Aang held up one finger for each note as he spoke, "that she was alive. Two, that she was not cooperating with them. And three, that we needed to act before he realized we'd intercepted his letter. So I checked the nickname of the sender against your labels, found the camp, and lead a small attack."

"And?"

"And I was right. We ambushed their settlement, found Toph, arrested most of them, and sent trackers after the ones we couldn't catch."

A significant pause followed, during which Sokka stared dumbly forward and failed to funnel his thoughts into a cohesive sentence. "…where is she now?"

"Three rooms down on your right. She's in pretty bad shape—they worked on her for two hours, and they had to re-break her leg because it healed wrong, so that's going to take a while to mend. But they think she’ll be okay.”

Sokka wanted so badly to feel something—relief, joy, apprehension, anything at all. After all this time spent sick with debilitating fear, after wasted rescue attempts and planning, she was ten feet away. Perhaps this numbness was his body's natural defense against the onslaught of emotions that by right should have begun with Aang's appearance in the room. Maybe it was disbelief. Instead of contemplating this phenomenon, he picked at a loose thread in his blanket and announced the one thought that _had_ broken through.

"She hates me," said Sokka. Right now he hated himself enough for the both of them.

"No, she doesn't."

Hopping down from his perch on the drawer top, Aang crossed the room and sat at the foot of the bed. "If she did, then she wouldn't have asked if you made it back. It was the first thing she said… that, and during our first sweep of the battle sight, I found _this_."

He opened his hand, and in his palm sat a curved ring of smooth rock. An inexplicable tremor ran through Sokka at the sight of Toph's earth bracelet. He plucked it up, delicately, pressed between his thumb and forefinger as if he feared it might dissolve at his touch.

"She must have tossed it into the woods before she was captured," said Aang. "Maybe you ought to give it back."

When Sokka showed no sign of immediate improvement, too fixated on turning the bangle over and over in his hands, Aang sighed.

"Besides," Aang said, "if she hates anyone right now, it's me."

Sokka snapped out of his trance. "What? Why?"

Aang smiled wryly. "I wouldn't let her crush their heads under a rock."

It took Sokka another hour to scavenge enough nerve to visit her. Aang and Katara thankfully did not pressure him either way, and left to find lunch without so much as a raised eyebrow. Sokka shuffled down the hall and waited outside the door of Toph's room, one hand settled on the knob, for another minute. Only when he started to attract curious stares from the staff did he slip through.

He had not expected her to be awake, but a relieved sigh still followed when he saw that he was right. Her leg, which had been damaged during the fight that parted them and evidently re-broken just recently, was tightly bound and propped up on two pillows. If Sokka had seen her before speaking with Aang, he would never have believed that she was conscious during the rescue. The dark smudges beneath her eyes suggested a level of tired he couldn't imagine. He was afraid to blink.

Slowly he limped forward, propped his crutch against the bed frame, and sat down on a three-legged chair. His hands automatically sought hers, but he held them back. If he touched her, she might disappear and all he would have left was this image—Toph, starved and ghostly pale, her breaths even but quiet and shallow.

Sokka inspected what he could see of her wounds, forcing himself to paint in his mind an image of what she had suffered. Toph's face displayed several cuts in various stages of healing, her bottom lip swollen, neck streaked with long, fingerlike bruises. He didn't want to think of how they'd gotten there, but several ideas occurred to him which he promptly shoved off, feeling sick. She had surprisingly few burns, most of them restricted to her forearms alongside an assortment of other scratches and sores. Her captors had kept her restrained, as evidence by the raw rings around her wrists. Toph's unbroken leg was beneath the bedclothes, but the foot peeking out of her cast seemed fine, if not dirtier than usual—a good sign, if he could find one.

Glancing up, Sokka saw that the sun was sinking down behind the tree trunks. He had been knocked out all day, and would not feel tired for some time still. The doctor appeared during rounds to give them both a hefty dose of painkillers, and pointed out the various wounds that they, including Katara, had worked on during the long surgery. Most of it he had figured just by looking, but he then learned of a long gash that ran from Toph's right underarm down to the crest of her hip.

"We have no idea how it got there, but whoever stitched it up at the camp did a great job."

Somehow this comment did not make him feel any better. She left with the promise of dinner soon, and Sokka put his head down on the mattress in the silence that followed. By the time food arrived, he was snoring.

A sharp cough startled him awake. He became aware of several things at once; the lateness of the night, the crick in his neck, and finally a soft weight on the back of his head. When he stirred, the hand— _her_ hand, he realized after a moment of confusion—slipped down to his neck before pulling away.

"I thought you'd never wake up," she said.

At first he could not speak. In waiting (and he had been prepared to wait all night) Sokka had arranged a long-winded apology that he meant to give whether she wanted it or not. The sound of her voice, however feeble, seized these plans and shattered them like porcelain. Wincing as he sat up, Sokka took Toph's hand. Stinging disbelief faded for the first time as her fingers interlaced with his, the callused skin of her palm anchoring him down.

Sokka coughed to loosen up his tight throat. "Hey."

The corner of her mouth ticked upward at the sound, her shoulders eased from their tense shrug. "I hear you've been the village pain in the ass," she said.

"Don't worry about me, I'm fine," said Sokka. For all his want to be gentle, he couldn't keep a hint of force out of his tone. "Toph, listen. I'm… I am so sorry for what I did. I don’t know how I can—"

"Shh!"

Startled, Sokka obeyed. Toph let a long pause ring between them before she reached to the side with her free hand and grasped the rail of the bed. A grimace passed fleetingly over her face, and a moment later she had tugged herself all the way to one side of the mattress. She patted the newly freed space with a casual air. Sokka hesitated only a moment before climbing into bed with her. A bit of shuffling ensued, during which both parties choked back various pained noises, until finally they had snuggled up together in the most comfortable way they could find.

Toph's head fell to his shoulder. He studied what he could see of her face beyond her screen of tangled black hair. Eyes closed, she appeared to be at peace.

At last Sokka felt something, a twinge in his gut that was not one emotion but a culmination of many. It was joy without fluttering glee, remorse without added jabs of agony, disbelief meeting reverence at her touch and the contentedness in her sigh. He was suspended alongside himself, weightless, all but coming down from the most unbelievable high. He could not assign a name to this sensation—presently he was too mollified by her weight on his side to even try.

"It's really good to see you," he whispered.

"It's good to hear you," she said.

The pressure on his chest was heavy still, but growing lighter. He took her hand again, reveling in the cool weight of her palm. "I never should have left you."

"Well I'm glad you did," Toph said. "Just… don't leave me now."

* * *

" _One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering."_ – Jane Austen

* * *

After several days, Sokka began to grow nervous. During his first week in the hospital (the week that he was conscious, anyway), he had been inconsolable to the point where people began to worry about his sanity. Toph quickly established herself as the opposite case—she handled her wounds with minimal complaint and a grim sense of humor. She answered questions without side commentary. When her parents got word of her return and barged in to smother her with affection, she wiped away their tears but shed none of her own. Aside from the fact that she was all but bedridden, Toph acted like she was completely fine.

Sokka couldn't figure out exactly what bothered him about this response. It would look natural to anybody who had not been friends with her for more than half a decade; Toph had simply come to terms with what had happened and decided to embrace life rather than dwell on the past. Every so often, though, he caught her in an off moment. Her laugh wouldn't ring with its natural triumph, and her smile faded always a second too soon.

The bruises on her neck began to morph from purple to a sickly shade of green. Still Sokka didn't ask if she was doing okay.

His earliest attempts to dote upon her had been shut down with Toph's apparently playful threat to punch him unless he stopped worrying. Instead he made himself available at all moments of the day. The pair dined together, took the risk of knocking over everything in the corridor by walking up and down it together, and often fell asleep in the same bed.

Sokka also heard one medic telling the other that Toph wasn't sleeping at all, which had puzzled him. Toph slept poorly at best, prodded awake every hour or so by splitting pain (and, Sokka suspected, the occasional nightmare). But he was sure that she slept at least a _little_ bit—upon waking on the nights when he crawled into bed beside her, he often found her asleep with her head nestled into the crook of his shoulder. Snores did not lie. The relationship between his presence and her quality of sleep did not occur to him until much later. He simply carried on with their unspoken agreement not to let one out of the other's sight, and ignored all the prying questions whirling around in his head.

Then General Wei arrived without notice and with a small group of officials, stating that that the nature and length of Toph's captivity meant she ought to be debriefed.

Aang protested at once, asking that Toph have more time to recover before they try to dig up any information from her. Even Katara, who lived by the philosophy that talking out one's problems solved most emotional trauma, suspected that their motives were less in Toph's interest and more in the interest of extracting whatever knowledge they could gather. But Toph agreed, dismissing her friends' objections so nonchalantly that Sokka almost believed her indifference. An hour later found Sokka trailing nervously behind Toph on her way to the empty office that served as an impromptu conference room.

Sokka intended to stake out just beyond the closed door, just in case Toph should need him for something. Instead, he was immensely surprised when she tugged him right on through the door. When he reminded her that this meeting was by invitation only, she reminded him that she could do whatever she wanted and the others could deal with it. There was no escaping her logic. Head bowed, Sokka plonked down in the chair beside Toph at one end of the table, propping both their crutches on the adjacent wall. Five grown men stared back from the other side, evidence laid out across the table and writing instruments at the ready.

The process began. General Wei led the questioning, beginning by reiterating his sympathies and assuring her that the debriefing would be quick and painless.

"I'm going to ask you some simple questions, just to make sure our notes are one and the same. Do you understand?" When Toph gave a terse nod, he continued, glancing down at his notes. "We believe that we have captured the leader of the group. Can you tell us his name?"

"Huo," said Toph.

A tremor washed over Sokka at the blankness of her tone.

"In the interest of ensuring a subordinate has not traded places with him, can you give us any identifying features?"

"He has a scar on the right side of his neck."

"Very good,” he said, shuffling his papers. “It appears that we have the right man in custody. Now, do you have any idea why they held you hostage as opposed to the alternative?"

Toph shrugged. "Leverage or information, maybe."

"You don't think the decision was premeditated?"

"No. They didn't know what to do with me once they had me," she said. "To be honest, I didn't expect to make it that far."

Sokka's heart plummeted. General Wei's eyebrows rose. Toph sat with her back perfectly straight in the chair.

"They had a thick wooden cell in their headquarters."

This little tidbit Sokka never heard from an official source, but he had spent several hours tweezing slivers out of Toph's hands and had pieced together the rest on his own.

"Everyone's got a wooden cell these days. I have a squad of metalbenders at home. You'd be stupid not to have one."

"Very well.” The general made a note. “Did Huo interrogate you?"

"Yes."

"What did he ask?"

"He wanted to know what was in the intelligence report. His spies had followed us from the southern base and knew that we were carrying something important. I think they had planned on attacking us along the way, and then it was just our bad luck that led us straight to their camp."

"Did you tell him what was in the report?"

"Of course not," Toph said tersely. "I'm not brainless."

"Did he attempt to extract the information with force?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"Does it matter?"

"Perhaps."

This time Toph paused. Sokka was watching her out of the corner of his eye, afraid that if he moved he might disrupt her flow. A sizeable portion of him wished that he could do just that—throw himself between Toph and the officers, shout at them to back off, and maybe even stare General Wei down before escorting Toph out the door. Just as he was starting to build his resolve, though, she spoke again.

"He grabbed my neck," she said, "until I passed out."

"And then what?"

"I don't know."

"You mean you don't remember?"

"I mean I was unconscious."

The General was unaffected, almost skeptical. "How did you feel when you woke up again?"

"Dizzy," she said.

"Were you aware of your surroundings?"

"Yes."

"When we seized him, he had an infected bite wound on his forearm."

Toph said nothing.

"Did you tell him anything?" said General Wei. "Anything at all? Any mention of any detail of any of your plans? Even something insignificant might be important."

"No," Toph said, with a hint of force.

"Did he also inflict the injury that you acquired on your—" he glanced down at his notes, "right side? The one was already stitched up when you were recovered by the Avatar's team?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I bit him."

"Why did you bite him?"

"Because asking nicely wasn't working out," she huffed, sarcastic. "Are you suggesting that I shouldn't have fought back?"

"Not at all! I am simply making sure that the two of us are on the same—"\

“ _No._ ”

His sentence was cut abruptly short as Toph stood. Balancing on her one good leg, she slammed her palms down on the tabletop so suddenly that everyone else in the room jumped in their seats. The energy had rushed back into her all at once, pouring out through her voice with paralyzing ferocity.

"Don't lie to me. You're just trying to figure out if I lost my guts and spilled all our information. Well guess what? I didn't." She snatched up her crutches. "Any leaks you may have had during that time came from someone else. You're going to have to find out who on your own because I don't know. And don't you _dare_ try to pin it on me."

Before Sokka had time to react, the slamming door had announced Toph's exit. He caught her halfway down the hall, reached for her sleeve, and winced when she slapped his hand away. Toph led him wordlessly down a series of corridors he had never explored before, pushing her way through doors with her crutch. Finally, after a series of twists and turns, they reached the back entrance to the building. A wave of cold rushed over them as they stormed out onto the loading dock.

It had snowed again the night previous and the storm had moved on, leaving behind a sunny sky and whip-sharp air. Sokka took a few deep breaths and tried to rationalize everything he had heard just minutes before. Below him, the ground was trembling.

Toph stood perfectly still, face angled toward the ground. He couldn’t decide if she was thinking hard, or merely trying to keep herself from tearing the building down with her bare hands.

"I lied in there," she said, at long last.

He was surprised to find his voice, and even more surprised when he replied, "I know."

"They didn't keep me for information. I made it clear from the beginning that they'd get more out of me dead than alive."

Tentatively Sokka stepped forward, but Toph snapped up on her crutches and whipped around to face him.

"No, wait," she said, and he shuddered to hear that it was a desperate request. "I never want to say this again, so I need you to listen."

When his only response was a slight tilt of the head, she pressed forward.

Toph explained the ordeal in cold facts, only hinting at her personal views and getting nowhere near the emotional aspects of the experience: The battle wore on despite her being severely outnumbered, and it was only when someone hit her with a sleeping dart that she was overcome and transported to the rebel headquarters.

Toph awoke blind and dazed in a wooden cell, bound and fastened to the wall by her wrists, surrounded by a ragtag band of soldiers. For hours they drilled her with questions about the southern stronghold and the Earth Kingdom's plans for the rest of the movement, beating her for her staunch refusal to cooperate. When it became clear that she would rather die than betray her friends, they agreed by vote that killing her was the next best thing. The delivery of her broken body, they reasoned, would put a debilitating dent in the morale of the movement. That was when Huo cut across their murder plans and demanded that she stay, tied up within the dingy cell.

"So for the most part, I was completely alone. Nobody spoke to me, not even the guards. And _he_ didn't touch me—" she pointed to the swollen blotches on her neck, "until the very end."

Somewhere far off, Sokka heard Appa's low roar. No doubt he and Katara would be looking for them soon, to catch up on the debriefing. Still, neither of them budged. Sokka flexed his chilled fingers, watching Toph's uneven breath rise and disperse. Thus far she had reiterated her story with little reaction, but the unsettled fear in her face told Sokka that they had arrived at the crux of the story.

"He started getting angry. He must have known Aang getting closer to finding them and there was nothing he could do about it. So he took it out on me… I wasn't lying when I said he choked me, but he didn't do it to get answers. He did it because he _could_."

This time Toph faltered. She was running her thumb along the side of her throat, up and down the length of the vein that lay beneath. Tears had burned her eyes red and glassy, and Sokka did not realize that he was holding his breath until his head began to spin. Tentatively he steadied himself and took a wary gulp of air.

"The day before Aang showed up, he came into my cell and sat down. He did that a lot—he used to tell me things, when I was coming around after passing out. Like how the harmony restoration movement ruined everything for his people because they couldn’t just take whatever they wanted, and how I was betraying the rest of the world by following. But this time it was different. He had a knife."

Now the tears began. Toph made an effort to wipe them away at first, but each one replaced the previous before she could drop her hand. And so she let them fall, slipping down her face and off the end of her chin, staining her tunic dark.

"When I heard the sheath, I knew I had to try. If I could just get out of the cell and onto some earth, I could get away. My ankles and wrists were tied, and of course the knife was made of wood, but it was better than nothing. So I went for it. When he tried to grab me, I bit him."

Sokka waited as Toph wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. As much as he wanted to cross the short gap between them and do something, he stayed put under the force of her initial request. The fast catch in her breathing sounded like it might trail off into hyperventilation unless she could calm down.

"Did his soldiers stop you?" he asked, quietly.

Toph shook her head, shifting on to her broken leg only long enough to wipe the wetness from her chin.

"I didn't get that far. When he was down, I got the knife and cut my feet free so I could run. But I wasn't as strong as usual. He jumped on me, got the knife back, and had me pinned down before I could even get out of the cell."

Here she paused, rubbing her hand along one bare arm, closing herself in from the cold and the memory. "You know, I have all of this amazing power and talent… most of the time I forget how little I am. All he had to do was take me away from the earth and take away my food, and my own body betrayed me. That's when he did this."

Toph turned sideways, tugged her tunic out of the neat tuck into her belt, and pulled it up to reveal her right side. The doctor had been right—whoever had stitched the long gash had done a magnificent job. The medic took what could have been a messy, jagged wound and turned it into a neat line of tiny black stitches. Sokka shuddered, not from the sight of the scar but the thought of the man who had left it there. And though his insides were recoiling by the very idea of this violation, Sokka maintained his somewhat damaged composure.

"That's terrible," he said in a whisper. "Toph, I'm so—"

"It's _not_ terrible." With a frustrated growl, Toph let her tunic fall back into place and hobbled over to the wall. The crutches clattered to the ground as she let the stone bear her weight instead. "I mean, yes, okay, it was an awful, painful nightmare, but give me a few months and it'll be like nothing ever happened. Katara doesn't even think the scar will be that bad. It could have been much, _much_ worse than this. I should be dead."

Reading Sokka's silence as commentary, Toph cast her sightless gaze downward and let herself slip to the ground.

"I know, I _did_ make it. I'm lucky. So _why_ am I so angry?" Toph's hands flew to the sides of her head and grabbed a fistful of hair, "I feel like I'm constantly holding myself back from tearing everything apart! I just can't— _agh_ —"

A surge of pain jolted through her side, rocking her in place. Toph swore, cradled her midriff, and dropped her head to one knee.

At the sight of Toph on the precarious edge of a complete and incoherent breakdown, Sokka had allowed himself one step forward. Even after spending these last days as an inseparable pair, Sokka hesitated to approach her now. For a moment he sensed that he was contemplating something taboo, a breach of the rapport they had established over their long years of friendship. The presence of anyone, however wounded and well-intentioned, might be more hindrance than help.

But then the real tears started, and Sokka strode across this blockade as easy as if it were of his imagination. He dropped down beside Toph with some difficulty, his leg sticking out at an uncomfortable angle once he sat. Sokka gently pried Toph's hands away from her head, and when she let herself fall sideways, he caught her against his chest and waited for the tears to stop.

Afterward, once his tunic was soaked through and Toph assured him (for the third time) that she was done using him as a human facecloth, Sokka clambered to his feet and offered Toph his hands. A few weeks ago, she would have laughed at this gesture and knocked him backward for added effect. Now she reached up without comment, paused as they both braced themselves, then let him pull her upright. Toph sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth, fleetingly clutching her side.

"You should probably keep that covered with a bandage," he said, sheepishly.

"Yeah, you're probably right…"

Toph and Sokka surveyed one another in the momentary quiet that followed, shivering slightly in the cold. Then they both stepped in at once and embraced a second time.

"Thank you for not asking if I was okay," she said. "I didn't want to have to lie to you, too."

His breath escaped in the form of a dark chuckle. "You're welcome."

"And in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not okay right now," said Toph, pulling back from the hug enough to show a crooked half-smile. "But I think I will be."

* * *

" _The injuries we do and those we suffer are seldom weighed in the same scales."_ – Aesop

* * *

Recovery was a slow and often agonizing process, but it was one which Toph and Sokka undertook with newfound vigor.

With the exception of a few very brief and private moments, in which tears were quickly purged and blotted, they found they were surprisingly stable. Emotionally, at least. In his naïveté Sokka had hoped that their shared enthusiasm would take some of the soreness out of his bones, which he quickly found would not be the case. Morning still greeted him with stiff joints and peeling burns, but his ribs ached rather than stabbed, and his bum knee could almost support his full weight.

Yet regardless of his marked improvements, Sokka felt a humbling shame whenever he compared his progress to Toph's. Even with her broken leg, she had launched headfirst into training under the premise that she needed to be in shape in case the movement needed her. She cut her dosage of painkillers in half, ignored the nagging of her many welts and bruises, and was prone to dropping to the floor at any moment to do pushups. Sokka once walked into her bedroom to find her dangling by her arms from a plaster pipe in the ceiling, having climbed it to do chin-ups without planning how to get back down.

Toph paid for her efforts with muscle soreness and fatigue that left her prone to falling asleep in inappropriate places—on the floor of his room, in the hospital corridor, and once in her dinner plate. He had assumed that she was eager to regain her strength due to pride; after lying helplessly in a cell for two weeks, Toph needed to show the world that she was strong enough to fight back.

Though there was some truth to his reasoning, Sokka soon found that her diligence was not without ulterior motivation. She had neglected to tell him that the head doctor had arranged for them both a physical evaluation. Needless to say, when they arrived for their inspection, they were baffled by Toph's results. For someone of such slight stature and in such poor condition at admission, it seemed almost impossible that she should be up to par with Sokka's strength. But she was, and Toph could not contain her smug satisfaction when the evaluators declared that _both_ of them were officially ready for formal rehabilitation.

Four days later, Toph and Sokka passed through the outer wall of Ba Sing Se and checked in to the university clinic.

They were given adjacent rooms on the second floor, with balconies that overlooked the middle ring of the city. Unlike the threadbare hospital that smelled of antiseptic, these new rooms resembled an inn with quilted beds and overstuffed floor cushions. Sokka unpacked his meager bag; his apartment was just a trolley ride south from here, and even though the walk would probably do him good, he had little desire to return there just yet.

The first night Toph and Sokka spent wandering from room to room, supplementing their exploration with fresh fruit pilfered from the kitchen. They found small, clinic-like offices and doctor's check-up rooms, several gymnasiums equipped with weights, a dojo with a soft floor for sparring, and several other empty rooms.

Upon reaching the end of their self-guided tour, Toph and Sokka hesitated in the hallway before parting for the evening. After spending most nights in the same bed, it seemed almost strange to retire alone. Sokka paced in circles around the room for some time after saying goodnight, gripping the furniture to balance his still-unsteady gait and casting dark glares at the bed—which, though only marginally larger than his creaky hospital bed, seemed big enough to swallow him up. Eventually, when it occurred to him that his constant footfalls were probably annoying Toph (who he assumed, on nothing more than a gut feeling, was also awake), he lay down atop the covers and closed his eyes.

Despite the events that led up to this point, Sokka caught himself enjoying his time at the clinic. The city itself was not his favorite place, but after years of living here he found it almost pleasant. Toph made no secret that she _abhorred_ Ba Sing Se, much preferring her cozy apartment and prestigious academy in Republic City to this hub of political shenanigans. The physical therapy center, however, was part of the ever-growing university. This meant the majority of their interactions were not with stuffy politicians, but with fit and eager students who were not only honored to help two of the most famous war heroes in recent history, but also thrilled at the prospect of kicking their asses with exercise. After the first day of physical therapy, Sokka could not sit without his legs giving out beneath him. He welcomed this splintering tenderness in his muscles as a sure sign of recovery, diving into each new challenge as one would approach a game and not leaving until his trainer had to force him down.

Several more weeks passed. Aang and Katara, who divided their time between negotiations in Republic City and Ba Sing Se, stopped by for a few days' visit and caused much commotion among the university students. Toph's cast was removed and she focused her attention on rebuilding the strength in that leg. Sokka went for jogs in the morning, lifted weights after breakfast, and soundly conquered his trainer in sword fighting each evening. His back-and-forth with Toph was as rich as it had always been—they made silly observations, cracked jokes in the lifting room that more than once caused near-accidents due to laughter, and told war stories to the staff and patients with such a dynamic that they could move an audience from grins to tears within one sentence.

But something was wrong. Rather than ease the constriction in his chest, time only twisted it tighter until, at times, Sokka thought that he might succumb to another one of those awful panic attacks. They were fleeting moments, coming and going without notice, but they left him with such _emptiness_.

Sokka contemplated this one night while sitting out on the balcony. The tiny space was bordered by an iron gate, whose vertical bars cut thin, black strips into his view of the lighted city. Unlike the southern tip of the Earth Kingdom, winter could not extend its wings over Ba Sing Se and thus settled for brandishing a chilly breeze. Hardly a threat to a South Pole native. He sat with his back to the wall and his mended leg stretched out long before him, a piece of paper crumpled in one hand. The trainer had presented the discharge notice as a gift to be celebrated, and indeed, in that moment Sokka had cheered along with him. Now, as he looked out over the hundreds of glimmering houses, he felt a distinct sense of distance that heightened the constant twinge of dread.

Sokka craned his neck backward, peering through the gap in the curtains to where Toph had sprawled diagonally across his bed. Fingers laced behind her neck, she lay in peaceful indifference to his troubles. For all that she had done to get here, Sokka almost couldn't bring himself to take it away.

Resignedly, he climbed to his feet and ducked under the curtain, padding barefoot across the floor until he had reached the side of the bed. Toph's feet hung over the edge of the mattress, her toes drawing a lazy circle in the air.

"What's up, Snoozles?" she said, otherwise nonplussed by his appearance.

"They're kicking us out," said Sokka. He sat down and, catching himself from handing the document over, looked it over again as if he expected to find a fine print solution to his newest concern. "Or what I should say is, we're officially fit enough to leave."

Toph paused just a moment before she sat up, stretched, and yawned.

"I figured as much. Ming said I was all but ready for battle today, so I knew it had to come soon. Even though my leg still isn't up to where it should be. Just _look_." Shifting her legs out straight, Toph pointed her toes skyward to tighten the muscles in her calves. "You can tell one leg is still skinnier than the other one."

She was right. Sokka couldn't withhold a smirk as he leaned over to inspect. Indeed, at the widest curve, the muscle beneath her left shin was distinctly thinner than its counterpart. He chuckled quietly and, pulling her ankles taut, made a show of inspecting the difference.

"Yup," he said, "definitely not even. I think we ought to stay another week to make sure you even out."

Toph grinned. "You're right. My students might not take me seriously unless I'm at my prime."

"I think maybe them sending you that bouquet of frangipanis was their way of telling you to stay put for a while," Sokka said in a faux-serious voice, now grasping around the base of her knees with each hand and pulling his grip slowly downward. He had meant only to measure up the difference in muscle mass, but stopped when his thumb grazed over a slight bump adjacent to her shinbone. He hesitated before bending closer to inspect it. "Is that scar tissue?"

"No," Toph sighed. "Just the muscle. It's all kinked up in that spot."

"Does it hurt?

"A bit."

"Hmm… Could be nutrient deficiency. Have they been giving you anything for it?"

"Yeah, but—ah, to be honest, _that_ seems to be doing the trick."

Toph jerked her head to the aforementioned spot, and it was only then that Sokka realized he had been kneading into the twisted muscle with his thumb. His traitor hands had betrayed the block over his subconscious. But he lingered in spite of his sensible side's hesitation, and continued massaging out the knotted area for a while longer. Toph didn't seem to mind.

Sokka smiled to see her so at ease, in sharp contrast to the weeks of taut shoulders and strained smirks that they had just passed. Warmth filled his chest, an almost suffocating affection, and he was not sure what to do with it. He paused in consideration, letting his eyes roam over her sleepy pose. Somehow he knew that she was still alert and acutely aware of him kneeling beside her, even as her chin dipped to her chest in a drowsy lull. Now was as good a time as any. Sokka drew his hand back after pausing to rub her ankle.

"I have something of yours," he said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

He shuffled backward off the mattress and crossed the room to his bag. Tossing aside his sword and various clothing, Sokka dug down until he found the small, black bangle of earth nestled at the bottom.

"I don't know why I've held onto it this long," Sokka said as he eased back down beside Toph.

Curiosity had prompted her to sit up. Toph offered a palm when he reached out, and as he placed the bracelet in her hand he heard a breath of a gasp. Her fingers curled around it, instinctively tucking it against her chest.

"I've just been… confused," said Sokka, slowly. "This whole thing, all we've been through, I don't know what to make of it. But I figured you'd at least like that back before you go to Republic City."

For a long moment, Toph offered only a blank expression.

"Well, I'm glad you've figured it out," she said.

Then, with a causal air betrayed only by her hasty motions, she balled the earth into one fist and stood up from the bed.

"I really need to get some sleep," she said, arching her back in a wide stretch. "Ming is going to kill me tomorrow if I so much as yawn. Goodnight!"

Sokka didn't have time to process the implication of what he had said, much less come up with a response. The thud of the door against the frame snapped him out of his surprise before he could go after her. There was an alarming moment where an image of the North Pole played across his vision, Yue retreating in tears while he stood dumbfounded with a poorly-carved fish in his glove. He looked down at his hands to find them empty.

She had kissed him. Now she was dodging him. Still things were remarkably unclear, as if he had built a barricade in his brain between these disconnected actions and the answer, as if he could not bear to confront it. Only one thing was for certain.

Suddenly desperate for air, Sokka went to the balcony and caught the metal gate in time for his knees to buckle. The horror of recent events was fading like a bruise from dark to light, leaving him with clear perspective for the first time.

That looming sense of dread was not irrational after all, not a sign that he was losing his grip. They had returned to their friendship, but it was not the same—a profound intimacy had snuck into their everyday interactions, and now that he had it he couldn't face the prospect of its loss. He depended on it. Watching Toph leave again would pop the stitches of his healing wounds to let them bleed anew. And every time they reunited the process would repeat, the scar tissue growing bigger and uglier with every return. Mend and bruise, heal and break. Only marginally comforting each time and nowhere near enough to dull the present ache.

Until this exact moment, Sokka didn't realize that he could be in love because he never went through the motions of it. He had fallen in love before, and it was nothing like this. It was fuzzy feelings and obsessive desire— this is what he had felt with Yue and Suki, and in his limited experience he had somehow convinced himself that infatuation was the endpoint.

Sokka _did_ love Toph, he never denied that, but now he saw that it was in a different way than he imagined, and this knot tied around his chest was the answer:

He was in love, but he had not fallen there. Instead he had felt his way down the stony cliffside with his eyes closed, and only once he reached the bottom could he finally see.

The trouble was what to do next. As evidenced by Toph's hasty retreat, she was not eager to deal with his mangled interpretation of their friendship. If he went to her door now, he would find it locked from the inside and Toph unwilling to let him in. What was more, they had obligations elsewhere, he with the Council of Five and she with her students. It was bad enough that he had been gone so long—the paperwork and city project schematics were surely piled to the ceiling now, and he had an obligation to tackle it. They had been through enough in the last weeks without Sokka complicating things further. What she needed—what he needed—was a dose of normalcy. Once they returned to their lives, maybe his feelings would sort themselves back out.

It was a bitter lie to swallow, but he had no choice.

* * *

That night Sokka slept poorly, fraught with anxiety over how Toph might receive him in the morning. He was afraid she might hit him, or worse, ignore him. However, the only change the next day was that her bracelet had returned to its rightful place on her bicep. She greeted him with a friendly punch to the shoulder and news that the staff had set up a special breakfast to celebrate their pending departure.

The celebration was pleasant enough given the writhing in Sokka's stomach, which he attempted to drown under several cups of tea. Some of the staff had dragged tables into an empty room and set up a neat little array of fruits, drinks, and pastries. Toph seated herself on the opposite end of the table from Sokka, between Ming and one of the earthbending trainers. After about an hour, Toph and Sokka were shooed out of the room for cleanup and told to report to the dojo.

The rest of the day was unremarkable in the way of events, though Sokka spent a good deal of time trying to think up an eloquent way of discussing the future. Tomorrow they would separate and return to their pre-ambush schedules, fully healed. For their part, they ignored the matter entirely. It was not until later, when Toph had gone outside to practice her earthbending, that Sokka's trainer forced the conversation.

"So, what's your next big adventure?"

Sokka looked up from wiping a thumbprint from his sword to catch the trainer's eye. His name was Jin, a peppy twenty-something to whom Sokka had taken a liking. Having grown up in a sheltered Earth Kingdom town, he had a naiveté that Sokka envied—in Jin's mind there was a glorified idea of war and valor that overlooked the image of useless killing. When Jin had first met the wounded warriors, he had mused aloud that the battle must have been quite exciting. In doing so, he missed the dark look that crossed Toph's face, her fingers itching to jump to her splintered side. But in spite of this shortcoming, Jin was both a capable instructor and a skilled sparring partner. From day one, Jin had been the force behind Sokka's intense training, the one who ultimately put the sword back in Sokka's hand and told him to go for it. Today he planned for one last exhaustive lifting and sparring session before he set Sokka free, and no doubt his comment had only meant to get Sokka excited to leave. Sokka merely shrugged.

"I'm going to my place here, and Toph's going to Republic City."

"Really?"

Upon seeing Sokka's resignation, Jin faltered. He seemed almost startled by this news.

"What is it?" Sokka asked.

Now Jin looked downright uncomfortable, his shoulders rising to cover the blush creeping up his neck. "Nothing, it's just… some of us sort of assumed you two were… together?"

Sokka blinked, nonplussed. "Together how?"

"Together like, you know, _together_ together." Jin made a vague gesture with his hands, paused, and offered an embarrassed grin. "Sorry, we shouldn't have discussed it at all. Technically it's against policy. You, uh… can report me, if you like."

The last bit tore Sokka out of his revelation and made him notice that he had been staring dumbly at Jin for a full five seconds, too caught off guard to be embarrassed. He shook his head to clear the thought and waved Jin's concern away with a somewhat forced laugh. "It's okay, it doesn't matter. What _does_ matter is whether or not you think I'm battle-ready."

He raised his sword, and Jin drooped with momentary relief. The flush began to drain from his face. Unsheathing his sword, Jin matched Sokka's pose to formalize the engagement, thrilled for any opportunity to move past his unbidden speculation.

"Only one way to find out!"

* * *

Toph and Sokka trained straight through supper, then staggered back up the staircase, where someone had left dinner for two in Toph's bedroom. Sokka didn't know what to do. They chatted between bites of food, leaving most of the gaps to be filled by the clinking of soup spoons on porcelain.

Sokka could count their hours on both hands now, a horrible nausea building with the turn of each minute. Sipping casually from her water glass and tapping out a beat with her foot, Toph seemed largely unaffected. She was never one to display her emotions, but this seeming indifference only heightened his stress more. Surely she could feel the tension in his bones, the weight of his sigh as he tried to force out some of the strain. If she did, or if she was dealing with the same issues, she was doing a remarkable job hiding it.

Finally he broke under the weight of the silence. Setting his utensils down, Sokka folded his hands in his lap and turned to face her. "Okay," he said, slowly. "I feel sick."

"Maybe you ate too fast," said Toph.

Sokka paused, staring. When Toph did not respond to his hesitation, as he thought she would—it was not in Toph's nature to avoid conflict, and her silence spoke volumes more than he could grasp—Sokka rose, snatched up his bag, and started for the door. He was halfway through it when Toph spoke again.

"I won't see you tomorrow."

A tremor rocked him, shooting up through his legs to strike him right in the stomach. It was panic, his familiar companion as of late, flaring up once more. Sokka spun around to find that she had not budged from her seat; she sat motionless with her back to the door.

"What?" he said, voice subdued.

"I asked to be released a few hours early," Toph said. She pushed away her bowl and let her hands slide from the table. "My train leaves in an hour."

Too baffled to speak, Sokka merely stood there with his mouth hanging on its hinges. The rest of his awareness had disappeared in the wake of her confession, ears dimming out the sounds from the street below until he swore he could hear her breathing. Slowly Toph rose from her seat, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, and turned to face him.

"I didn't want to make a scene," she said. "This way's probably better."

Sokka stood for a long time, only halfway under the frame of the door. A block had grown between his brain and his tongue. If there was a time to resist, to open his arms and confess all that he had learned about himself since that day in the woods, it was passing by him now. But he could not speak. Sokka looked at Toph, just stood there with his arms frozen by his sides and looked, for so long that Toph finally shook her head and went to the bed to pack her things. This process did not take long, as most of her belongings had been pilfered away by her captors, and by the time he came-to she was standing before him once more.

"I'm sorry I didn't let you know sooner," she said. "It was kind of a last second decision."

"Let me walk you to the station," he said.

Sokka half expected her to protest on the grounds that she didn't need a body guard, but she merely tilted her chin in consent. The walk was thirty minutes of somber silence, each footfall a condemnation of his cowardice. The train was already waiting at the platform when they arrived. At the far end of the train, the conductor signaled the all aboard. Toph pulled Sokka into a hug and they stood there for a full minute, neither willing to let go first. It was the train's whistle that eventually wedged itself between them.

Gingerly Toph stepped back, rubbing her tender ribs with a disparaging smile. She aimed her fist at his arm for one last punch, but Sokka caught it mid-air and pressed it between his palms.

"I'll see you soon, okay?" he said. "As soon as I can get down there."

Toph nodded, clearly unconvinced. "Take care, Sokka."

Below their feet, the ground began to quiver as the train inched forward on the track. With a final wave, Toph turned, hiked her bag up on her shoulder, and jogged along the platform. Sokka watched her back retreat until she had hopped across the gap and disappeared into the train compartment, until the train left him standing alone in the wind of its wake.

He checked out of the clinic the next morning at sunrise, his single bag strapped across his chest and his sword on his back. Rather than hail a cart, Sokka took the long road back to his apartment and felt like a stranger upon crossing the threshold.

Someone had been here in his absence—Aang and Katara, most likely, on one of their trips to the city. They had cleared away the dust from the tables, drew the blinds, and returned the rest of his belongings from the hospital. Sokka dropped his bag just inside the door, stepped out of his shoes, and padded into the kitchen. Nothing there had changed.

Sokka bit his lip. He went through the cabinets and tallied up his food, which amounted to a half-empty bag of rice, a canister of (now stale) tea leaves, and some herbs. His stomach gave a forlorn growl. He would have to go to market…

When he first inherited the position as Water Tribe ambassador, Sokka had adored his new apartment. It was a cozy little place, safe, and a short ride to the university library. Though he missed his family terribly when they were gone, they lived in Republic City half the time and stayed in his second bedroom when they were around. His neighbors were friendly, his job stressful but rewarding, and his meals always fulfilling. Now, as he stood in the center of the kitchen with his hands stuffed into his pockets, shifting from good leg to bad and back again, Sokka could not remember ever feeling so alone.

Maybe he should take a nap, and when he woke up he could pretend that it was just a day like any other. Nodding to himself at his ingenuity, he started off for the bedroom. On his way, he caught his eye in the looking glass. His feet slowed and turned on their own accord, his shoulders following just behind. He looked exactly the same as always, save for the faint scar on his face. Leaning forward, Sokka touched his fingers to the wound, inspecting it. A firebender had put the notch in his left brow, which faded along his temple and picked back up at his hairline.

He thought of the discolored patches on his arms and chest, the remnants of old burns. Then he thought of Toph unconscious in her hospital bed, her neck swollen with bruises and her face littered with cuts. Sokka sighed and dropped his hands.

* * *

" _A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it."_ \- George Moore

* * *

Sokka made it exactly two days. The first day he spent in bed and wandering around the empty apartment like a lost child. On the second day he returned to the government building on the outskirts of the palace, where he was welcomed back to work by the Council of Five and other officials who wasted no time in depositing a monstrous pile of work on his desk. At dawn on the third day, Sokka sent a messenger hawk to his employers and hopped on the first train to Republic City.

At the start of the harmony restoration movement, when Republic City was still the melting pot colony of Yu Dao, the post-war economy and overabundance of ex-soldiers looking for work prompted a massive railway project. Within a few years, and with the cooperation of all manner of citizens, they had built a train line connecting the major Earth Kingdom cities. With rails running from Ba Sing Se Central Station to Republic City, Omashu, and a handful of other places, one could cut their commute down by more than half the time. The trains, which Sokka had originally helped to design, were modeled after the Fire Nation steam engines to make a bumpy but efficient transportation system.

A recollection of several long seasons of manual work flitted over Sokka's mind as he scooted through the crowded train corridor in search of a seat. Only after passing through multiple cars, sidestepping overwhelmed couples with screaming children, did he find an empty compartment by the caboose. He slipped inside, locking the door behind him and tossing his bag and sword on the floor. The ride from Ba Sing Se to Republic City took just over a full day.

For the first part of the trip Sokka kept to the compartment, draping himself over the lumpy seats in an effort to regain some of his lost sleep. Failing this, he dug some reading out of his bag, but he was too riled up to focus on ancient architecture, and the lurching of the train along its tracks soon made him sick. Eventually he wound up at the bar. There he ordered a meat sandwich and chatted with the other patrons, most of whom were traveling on business. His one drink turned into two, and then three when someone recognized him and insisted on buying him another. By the time he tromped back to his compartment, dizzy from the booze and tripping from the train, he was subdued enough to fall asleep.

Sokka awoke to screeching breaks, a signal that the train had arrived at the Republic City station. He leapt up in alarm, slinging his bag and sword into their rightful places. He had slept for almost twelve hours thanks to his overindulgence, and the sun's place in the sky announced that it was almost midday. Quickly Sokka washed up, brushed his teeth, and joined the other passengers on their disembarkment.

Ordinarily Sokka would have allowed himself a leisurely walk to admire the booming growth of Republic City, but being so close to the end of his journey had brought his unease back in full force. Three days had passed and still he hadn't figured out what to say to Toph, his best friend who may or may not understand how he was feeling. Every possible statement sounded dry and forced in his head.

_Hey Toph, I hope you don't mind, but I think I love you. Would it be okay if I just stuck around for a while, like… forever, maybe? No pressure, obviously._

Sokka groaned and shook his head. For someone who had casually interacted Toph only a few days before, he was sufficiently distraught by the time he reached the doorstep of her metalbending academy. He forced himself to take a few breaths, readjusted the belt of his tunic, and entered.

He had been through the grand arch of the entrance so many times that his feet carried him without hesitation to the main dojo. Upon crossing into the room, however, Sokka realized that something was wrong. Toph's squad of elite students was lined up in rows with their backs to him, practicing forms while the instructor bellowed directions. The voice, though, was not Toph's confident and feisty tone, but rather Penga's sweet loft.

"Sokka?" said Penga, spotting him from across the room.

All heads turned to face Sokka, who was once again dumbfounded out of words. The students dropped their forms and began whispering excitedly. Sokka blinked hard and looked around, as if Toph might be hiding behind the tall window's curtain. The surprise emanating from the students and their instructor was not a good sign.

"Sorry to interrupt, I was… where's Toph?"

"I thought she was with you," said Penga. "She took a train back to Ba Sing Se yesterday morning and left me in charge."

"Did she say when she'd be back?"

Penga shook her head. She bore very little resemblance to the little girl Sokka had helped to train all those years ago. Now a fully realized master, she stood with straight-backed confidence despite her obvious bewilderment.

"She put me in charge 'indefinitely'," said Penga. "It must have been important—we threw her a welcome back party, but she left right at the beginning. Said she forgot to do something. And she didn't even eat any cake!"

Sokka scratched his chin. "Hmm… sounds pretty serious."

"I know! Toph _loves_ cake!" Penga opened her mouth to go on, but stopped mid-breath. Sokka had already turned and started for the door. "Wait, where are you going?"

"If she comes back again, tell her to stay put," Sokka called over his shoulder.

If he was right, she was just arriving at his empty apartment. He hoped she would go to the government building, where his equally nonplussed employers might still be pouring over his hasty note— _Sorry to return and run, but I'm going to Republic City. It's an emergency. I'll be back soon to take care of some things._ Looking back, Sokka felt a mild embarrassment for having left so soon, and without anything more than a cryptic explanation. Once Toph heard it, though, hopefully she would understand. Hopefully she would still be there. He contemplated sending a messenger hawk to his coworkers so they could stop her, but his instincts overruled this thought, urging him to get home as soon as possible; if she, like him, had already turned around, the message would never make it.

The full epiphany didn't hit him until he had jogged halfway to the train station.

One of the factors leading up to Sokka and Suki calling it quits—if not the biggest factor—was the distance. It had been a situation, where after months and years of travel, the time finally came to settle down. They had struggled to maintain their long-term relationship, seeking the day when they could finally have some peace, only to find that when the time came, Suki wanted to live on Kyoshi Island and Sokka didn't. He was unwilling to stay, she unwilling to leave. So the constant to-and-fro became a mantra that neither wanted to continue. When they were apart, they missed the other terribly—so much that, when they were together, they became distracted and lethargic. At no point in their relationship did one chase after the other; neither of them had been willing to make that sacrifice. But Toph had gotten all the way home, stayed for one day, and turned back to the city she hated most in the entire world.

Sokka didn't want to hope, yet hope had already diffused through his system, hastening his pace. A strange elation mingled with the ever-present apprehension. It carried him to the station, onto the train, and through the second day-long trip across the country. He arrived at his apartment the next afternoon, sore and tired from his travels but brimming with wary energy. Hastily he ran up the front steps, fumbled with his keys, turned the lock, and stepped inside.

The apartment was empty. Sokka had never been so disappointed.

After scouring the house for any minute sign of her presence, he went back to the foyer and lay down on the floor. Once again, his instincts had proven themselves faulty.

A pillar of sunlight shone in through the window, pooling warmth across his ankles. Sokka took a long, slow breath. All through the winter the sunlight broke across his shoulders like a cold wave. Just weeks ago he had been sprawled across the ground for two hours in the woods, the sun blinding him with the snow's reflection. With bitter cold spreading up his limbs, Sokka had waited and scorned his weakness, the extent of his injury.

But today was the first taste of spring, with the sun sharing its heat for the first time. He wandered to a different place than this painful memory, to the summers spent with his family after the war. While Aang and Katara splashed around in the ocean, he and Toph would stretch out across the sand until their skin was stiff with sunburn. If he lay still enough, he could feel the ocean breeze skittering sand across his arms and chest. Sokka could only ever take the heat for a limited time before he, too, ran off to the water. But Toph could lie there forever. The whole earth thrummed with the sun's energy, she told him once. She loved to soak it all up, like a nutrient straight to her blood. On a day like today, after weeks of cold earth, he could imagine her sprawled out across the caked earth—

Sokka snapped to attention, leaping to his feet like a solider waking to an explosion. His bad knee groaned beneath the sudden pressure but he ignored it, darting off to the kitchen window. He hoisted himself up on the counter to get a clear view of the ground directly below. When he saw a splotch of green on the withered yellow grass of the garden, he nearly fell backward onto the floor.

Toph was upright by the time Sokka stumbled down the back steps. She sat cross-legged and smirking on the ground.

"I heard you took a little joy ride to my school," she said. "Did you notice the new curtains? They're velvet, very soft."

Sokka made it within a few feet of her before he stopped again. A thin sweat had spread over his palms. Absently he wiped it away on the sides of his pants, too overwhelmed by the sight of her to think of much else. Still he had no explanation, no speech to make his actions seem thought out. Toph didn't seem to mind. She stood up, the tiny smile tugging downward as she sensed the tenseness of his posture.

"Toph, I can't do this," Sokka blurted out, and cut over her when she opened her mouth to protest. "I tried, but I just felt like… after already losing you once…"

Sokka shook his head, held his arms wide in defeat, and let them fall back to his sides. "I need you, in my life. Always, if possible."

Toph's eyebrows shot up to her hairline. "Simple as that, huh? I thought you were confused."

"I was. I knew how I felt—or I was figuring it out—but we've always been friends, and we live in different cities, and I didn't know if it was _okay_."

"And now it's okay?"

Sokka shrugged. "I don't really care if it's okay. It is what it is, right?"

Toph dropped her head, digging the heel of one foot into the ground. Sokka watched the dust settle around her ankles and coat the layer of earth on her feet even thicker.

When she spoke, it was in a demure confession's tone. "I'm sorry this had to be so complicated," said Toph. "I walked away because I didn't understand how you could be confused. But sometimes I forget... just because _I've_ never been confused doesn't mean you couldn't be."

Sokka stood there, suddenly aware that his and Toph's faces had tinged a matching shade of scarlet. He would have thought them beyond blushing at this point in their relationship, and honestly felt a bit silly when he compared this moment—what should have been the picturesque image of romance—to the others that they had faced together. These last long weeks had drained him of whatever composure he possessed. He was not the suave gentleman that he had always imagined, and the struggle had left him helplessly battered.

But if Toph's words were true, then it was good enough. Sokka, standing humbly before her with his heart running over and his eyes blinking back tears, was good enough.

They moved simultaneously forward to the center of the gap, and hugged with such force that Sokka thought his ribs might re-break. Toph's head pressed into the dip of his shoulder, her fingers clutching to the back of his tunic. When they finally parted, Sokka breathed easy for the first time in weeks. The unease and insecurity had been squeezed out like dirt from a wound, like a stubborn sliver from the fingers. What remained, he thought as Toph clasped her hands together and dug one heel into the dirt, was almost exactly what they had been before. Almost.

"So what do we do now?" he said.

"Luckily, we have options. We could go to the market for groceries, and then you can help me write a letter to send for my stuff. Or we could pack your bags and take the noon train to Republic City."

The first part of Toph's statement baffled Sokka so profoundly that he almost missed the latter portion. He had to spend several moments processing the insinuations of the suggestion—that she would uproot her entire life, leave her school and students, all for what? It was one of the most ludicrous ideas Sokka had ever heard, so much that he completely lost his words and had to waste several seconds on returning to his body. He cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes, shook his head.

"You... would live here?" Sokka pointed to the ground in disbelief, as if Toph could not have possibly been talking about this spot. "You hate Ba Sing Se!"

Toph shrugged, unmoved by his tangible incredulity. "If that's what it takes."

Sokka couldn't stop the laugh from rising up in his throat, nor could he keep himself from throwing his arms around her again. Toph tensed at the abrupt gesture, and was just coming around when Sokka pulled back, seized her collar, and kissed her. Toph gasped when he let go, swerving on the spot and grabbing onto his arm for balance.

"Let's compromise," said Sokka.

Toph's eyes were wide, one hand pressed to the side of her head to keep it from spinning. "I'm listening," she managed.

"Okay, here's the plan. We go to the market, but only to get some dinner."

"And snacks!" Toph interjected after collecting herself. She casually set her hands on his hips, not bothering to hide a smirk as he playfully mirrored her gesture. "If we're staying the night, I'm going to need some snacks. There's nothing here but rice and stale beef jerky."

"Ah, right, good idea. Then tomorrow morning, we can go to the government building to work something out with the Council. And _then_ we go to Republic City."

Toph laughed under her breath. "You mean you don't want to live here?"

"I want to live wherever you want to live. If that's okay."

He waited in the following silence for her response. Standing here in the quiet yard, they seemed to be starting over. The weeks of aching loss and gnarly wounds had finally passed, and though the memories would only fade in time—catching them in the middle of the night, tightening around their necks like a clawed hand—time, for once, felt like something better than a condemnation.

Slowly, with a clinical expression, Toph raised her hands and held his face between them. She wandered down from his forehead, tracing the long line of his scar. Her thumbs smoothed over his eyebrows, over the tip of his nose. He caught the underside of her wrist with his lips as she moved along the contour of his jaw. Only when she had hooked his ears into the J of her forefinger and thumb did she finally smile.

"You know what?" said Toph, as Sokka took her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. "I think we're gonna make it."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Hope you had fun.
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic, here are a few others in this pairing. I would not necessarily suggest trying to go through all of my old fics... in fact, please do not do that. For me. But here are a few that I don't hate:
> 
> [Basically Tokka whump (with a happy ending because that's how I roll)](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4035674/1/Brute-Force-Desperation)
> 
> [The sequel to the Tokka Whump](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4943856/1/The-Aftermath) that I honestly like more than the prequel. All you have to know is that they had a Bad Time in the prequel.
> 
> [One that takes place slightly pre-Korra](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7242900/1/Reamalgamation) where Toph and Sokka haven't gotten together romantically but end up together at the end of their lives because I Was Sad About TLOK Being Announced and Hearing That Everyone Was Dead.
> 
> [This one is kind of funny](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3325559/21/Cactus-Juice) (Three times Sokka was naked, and one time he wasn't)
> 
> ANYWAY, cheers fellow ATLA friends, new and old. Thanks for reading!


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